Hamilton Case

SUMMARY

Hamilton Power Tools with Mr Campagna, the marketing manager for Hamilton Tools is a sales oriented company and wanted to adopt consumer oriented philosophy of the marketing concept. For more than 30 years, Hamilton Power Tools had been marketing industrial products by catering to the construction and industrial tool markets. Their construction product lines included tools such as power trowels, concrete vibrators, generators, and power driven tools. Their industrial lines were primarily pneumatic tools: drills, screw drivers etc. One of their products, the gasoline powered chain saw, was somewhat different from the traditional construction and industrial tools. It had the opportunity to acquire a small chain-saw manufacturer. The main reason behind this was to diversify the company into other markets.

The chain-saw market was changing rapidly during 1970, and Hamilton Tools executives realise that they needed some expert advice. Reports from trade publications, statistics from The Chain-saw Manufacturers’ Association, and his personal experience of 15 years made him believe that the state of the chain-saw industry was composed of professionals (lumber jacks), farmers, institutions, and casual users. The marketing executive had a short questionnaire on the warranty cards that purchasers returned after buying a Hamilton Chain-saw. According to the warranty card “survey”, the fastest growth in the chain-saw market was in the homeowner or the casual user market segment. This market consisted of the wood-cutters who used the chain-saw once or twice a year to cut firewood or to prune trees in the backyard.

Chain-saw sales began to slow down because of the seasonal nature of the business in 1978 due to which Mr Campagna and Ray Johnson had a meeting with John Hamilton and was able to convince the executive that some consumer research was necessary.

The research was conducted by Consumer Metrics, by Frank Baggins and the presentation was given in the...